THE SAMSON OPTION: ISRAEL'S
NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

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Chapter 1: A Secret Agreement

America's most important military secret
in 1979 was
in orbit, whirling effortlessly around the world every ninety-six
minutes, taking uncanny and invaluable reconnaissance
photographs of all that lay hundreds of miles below. The satellite,
known as KH-11, was an astonishing leap in technology:
its images were capable of being digitally relayed to ground
stations where they were picked up-in "real time"-for instant analysis by the intelligence community. There would be
no more Pearl Harbors.

The first KH-11 had been launched on December 19, 1976,
after Jimmy Carter's defeat of President Gerald R. Ford in the
November elections. The Carter administration followed
Ford's precedent by tightly restricting access to the high- quality
imagery: even Great Britain, America's closest ally in the
intelligence world, was limited to seeing photographs on a
case-by-case basis.

The intensive security system was given a jolt in March 1979,
when President Carter decided to provide Israel with KH- 11
photographs. The agreement gave Israel access to any satellite
intelligence dealing with troop movements or other potentially
threatening activities as deep as one hundred miles inside the
borders of neighboring Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.
The Israelis were to get the real thing: the raw and spectacular
first-generation imagery as captured by the KH-11, some of it
three-dimensional-and not the deliberately fuzzed and dulled
photographs that were invariably distributed by the American
intelligence community to the bureaucracy and to overseas allies in an effort to shield the superb resolution of the KH-11's
optics. [1]

It was a significant triumph for the Israeli government,
which had been seeking access to the KH-11 since the moment
of launch three years before. Jimmy Carter's decision to provide
that high-tech imagery was suspected by some American
intelligence officials as being a reward for Prime Minister
Menachem Begin's successful Camp David summit with Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat the year before. These officials understood
what many in the White House did not: adding an
Israeli dimension to the system was a major commitment-and
one that would interfere with the KH-11's ability to collect the
intelligence its managers wanted. The KH-11 was the most important
advance of its time, explained a former official of the
National Security Agency (NSA), the unit responsible for all
communications intelligence, and every military and civilian
intelligence agency in the government seemed to have an urgent
requirement for it. The goal of the KH-11's managers was
to carefully plan and "prioritize" the satellite's schedule to get
it to the right place at the right time, while avoiding any abrupt
shifts in its flight path or any sudden maneuver that would
burn excess fuel. With good management, the multimillion-dollar
satellite, with its limited fuel supply, would be able to stay
longer in orbit, provide more intelligence, and be more cost efficient.
Carter's decision to give Israel direct access to the
KH-11 completely disrupted the careful scheduling for the
satellite's future use; it also meant that some American intelligence
agencies were going to have less access to the satellite. "It
was an unpopular decision in many, many ways," said the former
NSA official.

There were no official protests inside the administration,
however: those few who were distressed by the KH-11 agreement
understood that any disquiet, or even second-guessing,
could jeopardize their own access to such information and thus
reduce their status as insiders.

The Israelis, not surprisingly, viewed the
KH-11 agreement
as a reaffirmation of respect and support from the Carter
administration,
whose director of central intelligence, retired Admiral
Stansfield Turner, had abruptly cut back intelligence
liaison with Israel and other friendly nations as part of a
restructuring
of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Israelis,
accustomed to far warmer treatment by Presidents Richard M.
Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, saw the men running the Carter
administration as naive and anti-Semitic; as men who perhaps
did not fully understand how entwined Israel's primary foreign
intelligence service, Mossad, had become with the CIA
during the Cold War. The 1979 agreement on the KH-11 was no
less than the twenty-eighth in a series of formal Israeli-American
cooperative ventures in strategic intelligence since the
1950s.

Nothing has ever been officially disclosed about these arrangements,
many of which were financed off-the-books-that
is, from a special contingency fund personally maintained by
the director of central intelligence. Through the 1960s, for example,
one of the most sensitive operations in the Agency was
code-named KK MOUNTAIN (KK being the CIA's internal digraph,
or designation, for messages and documents dealing with
Israel) and provided for untold millions in annual cash payments
to Mossad. In return, Mossad authorized its agents to
act, in essence, as American surrogates throughout North Africa
and in such countries as Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo.
Other intelligence agreements with Mossad revolved around
the most sensitive of Israeli activities in the Middle East, where
American dollars were being used to finance operations in
Syria, and inside the Soviet Union, where the CIA's men and
women found it difficult to spy. Some of the Soviet activities
apparently were financed by regular Agency disbursements and
thus cleared through the appropriate CIA congressional
oversight committees-but the complex amalgamation of
American financing and Israeli operations remains one of the
great secrets of the Cold War.

The Israelis had responded to Admiral Turner's
1977 cutback
in liaison-in essence, his refusal to pay for the continuing
operations in Africa and elsewhere-by sharply reducing their
flow of intelligence back to Washington. In the Israeli view, the
KH-11 agreement in March 1979 was made inevitable not by
the success of Camp David but by the CIA's failure to anticipate
the steadily increasing Soviet pressure on Afghanistan in
1978 and the continuing upheavals in Iran. There were large
Jewish communities in both nations-many shopkeepers in
Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, were Jewish-and Mossad's information
was far superior to the CIA's. Most galling to the President
and his top aides was the CIA's embarrassingly inept
reporting on Iran, where Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a
U.S. ally of long standing, had been overthrown in February
1979 in a popular uprising-despite a year-long series of upbeat
CIA predictions that he would manage to cling to power. [2] The
CIA had rejected the Israeli view, provided in a trenchant analysis
in 1978 by Uri Lubrani, a former Israeli ambassador to
Iran, that the shah would not survive. The CIA had failed the
President and forced the American leadership to turn once
again to Israeli help in trying to anticipate world events. It was
no accident that Lubrani was attached to the Israeli delegation
that negotiated the March 1979 KH-11 agreement in Washington.

***

The KH-11 imagery provided Israel-depicting any military
activity inside the border of Israel's four neighbors-is known
as I&W, for intelligence and warning, and carries the highest
classification marking in the American intelligence community.
The photographs, once processed, were to be picked up
by Israeli military attaches at a special Pentagon office controlled
by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the military's
joint intelligence service. There was one significant
caveat in all this: Israelis were not to be given any intelligence
that could help them plan preemptive strikes on their neighbors.

"I set up the rules," one senior American intelligence official
recalled. "The system was designed to provide [the Israelis]
with everything they could possibly use within [the one-hundred-mile] striking distance. If it was inside Syria or Egypt,
they got it all. If it was Iraq, Pakistan, or Libya, they didn't."

The official added, however, that he and his colleagues anticipated
from the outset that the Israelis would do everything
possible to get around the restrictions of the agreement. One of
the immediate Israeli arguments was that the limitations
should not apply to the joint enemy of the United States and
Israel-the Soviet Union. In the months ahead, there would be
constant Israeli pressure for access to satellite intelligence on
the Soviet supply lines to Syria and the Soviet involvement in
the training of Iraqi combat divisions in western Iraq. Those
requests were flatly turned down by the Carter administration.

Nonetheless, Israel was once again an essential ally, and even
if it could not get unfettered access to KH-11 imagery, the 1979
agreement did include language permitting Israel to make specific
requests for satellite intelligence. Each request would be
handled on a case-by-case basis.

The package was too much for British intelligence officials,
involved Americans recalled, who were described as "mad as
hell" about Israel's being provided with the chance to obtain
intelligence that they -- World War II allies and fellow members
of NATO -- could not get. [3]

Israel, as the British may have suspected, did have a secret
agenda in its constant maneuvering for KH-11 access, but that
agenda only became clear to a few top Reagan administration
policymakers in the fall of 1981. The unraveling began with a
bombing raid in Iraq.

***

It was a Sunday afternoon in early June
1981 and Richard V.
Allen, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser,
was taking it easy, sipping iced tea on the sundeck of his suburban
Virginia home and shuffling through a week's worth of
unread cables, many of them highly classified.

An aide in the White House situation room, which is staffed
around the clock, telephoned to report that the Israelis had
informed Washington that they had successfully bombed the
Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, twelve miles southeast of Baghdad.
Allen immediately telephoned Reagan, who was spending
the weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David, in the
nearby Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.

The President, he was told, had just boarded his helicopter
for the trip back to the White House. "Get him off," Allen
ordered. It was, after all, the new administration's first Middle
East crisis. The President took the telephone call amid the
background thumping of the helicopter blades.

"Mr. President, the Israelis just took out a nuclear reactor in
Iraq with F-16s." Israel, aided by long-term, low-interest American
credits, had been authorized in 1975 to begin the purchase
of seventy-five F-16s "for defensive purposes only."

"What do you know about it?"

"Nothing, sir. I'm waiting for a report."

"Why do you suppose they did it?"

The President let his rhetorical question hang for a moment,
Allen recalled, and then added:

"Well. Boys will be boys." [4]

The next morning, according to Allen, there was a meeting
of Reagan's high command at which Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger proposed canceling the F-16 aircraft sale. Others
at the meeting, including Vice President George Bush and
Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, agreed that some sanctions
against Israel were essential. Reagan glanced at Allen at one
point and with a gesture made it clear he had no intention of
taking any such step: "He rolled his eyes at me," Allen said.

The President's private acceptance of the raid was not reflected
in the administration's public actions. That afternoon
the State Department issued a statement, said to have been
cleared by the President and Secretary of State Alexander M.
Haig, Jr., formally condemning the bombing, "which cannot
but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area."
Nonetheless, recalled Allen, "Reagan was delighted ... very
satisfied" by the attack on the reactor at Osirak. "It showed that
the Israelis had claws, a sense of strategy, and were able to take
care of problems before they developed. Anyway, what did
Israel hurt?" Haig similarly was forbearing in private.

The Israeli bombing triggered worldwide protest, and a few
days later the White House announced the suspension of a
scheduled delivery of four more F-16s, a continuation of the 1975
sale. Two months later, with little fanfare, the administration's
real policy emerged: the suspension was lifted and the aircraft
were delivered without incident.

***

There was controversy inside Israel, too, over the bombing,
which had been debated at the highest levels of the Israeli government
since late 1979. Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad,
and Major General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence,
both opposed the attack, primarily because there was no
evidence that Iraq was as yet capable of building a bomb. [5] They
were joined in futile dissent by Yigael Yadin, the deputy prime
minister. At a late-1980 planning session, Saguy continued to
inveigh against the mission, arguing that the adverse reaction
in Washington would be a more serious national security threat
to Israel than was the Iraqi reactor. [6] He took exception to the
view that any Israeli military steps to avoid a "second Holocaust"
were permissible. Saguy suffered for his dissent; the
chief of military intelligence was not told of the mission until
June 4, three days before it was scheduled to take place. Saguy
responded by renouncing any responsibility for the raid and
threatening-briefly-to withhold intelligence.

The mission planners, anxious to avoid international protest,
had gone to extremes to mask the operation: it was hoped that
Iraq and the rest of the world would be unable to fix blame for
the bombing on the unmarked Israeli Air Force planes. The
attack had been carried out, as planned, in two minutes, and
the likelihood of any detection was slight. But Menachem Begin,
buoyed by the success, stunned his colleagues on June 8 by
unilaterally announcing the Israeli coup. On the next day, as
Israel was besieged with protests, the prime minister defended
the operation and vowed that Israel was ready to strike again, if
necessary, to prevent an enemy from developing the atomic
bomb. "If the nuclear reactor had not been destroyed," Begin
said, "another Holocaust would have happened in the history
of the Jewish people. There will never be another Holocaust.
. . . Never again! Never again!"

Two days later, at a British diplomatic reception, Begin
again shocked the senior officials of his government, as well as
the intelligence community, by bragging that the Israeli planes
also had destroyed a secret facility buried forty meters--130 feet
-below the reactor at Osirak that was to serve as the assembly
point for the manufacture of Iraqi nuclear bombs. The appalled
Israeli officials knew that Begin's remarks were descriptive not of the nonexistent underground weapons facility at
Osirak, but of one that did exist in Israel. Begin also told newsmen
at the reception that the Iraqi government had hidden the
facility from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
which had inspected the reactor at Osirak in January 1981, under
provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to
which Iraq was a party.

Israeli government spokesmen attempted to recoup the next
day by telling newsmen that Begin had misspoken; the underground
facility was only four meters, not forty, below the surface.
The government's worst fears, however, were not
publicly realized in the subsequent days and weeks: Israel's biggest
secret remained a secret. [7]

By 1981, Israeli scientists and engineers had been manufacturing
nuclear bombs for thirteen years at a remote site known as
Dimona, located in the barren Negev region south of Jerusalem.
Aided by the French, Israel had constructed a nuclear reactor
as well as a separate facility-hidden underground-for.
the complex process of chemically separating the reactor's most
important by-product: weapons-grade plutonium. Begin had
visited the underground facility at Dimona at least once since
becoming prime minister in 1977 and, Israeli officials told me,
had been provided in the days before the raid at Osirak with a
detailed memorandum about it. The officials suggested that Begin,
in his public remarks, had simply transferred what he had
seen and read about Dimona to Osirak. "He confused one with
the other," said one Israeli, acknowledging that his interpretation
was a charitable one.

Yitzhak Hofi, the Mossad chief, was not as charitable. Two
weeks after the Osirak bombing, he gave an unprecedented
newspaper interview-Hofi was cited only by title in the article,
under the rules of Israeli censorship--to complain about
politicians who were compromising secret intelligence. There
was no doubt in the Israeli intelligence community about
which politician Hofi was criticizing.

***

The secrets of Dimona may have been safe from the Western
press, but Dimona itself was facing a much more immediate
threat. Israeli officials acknowledged that their intelligence services
saw evidence in the days after the June 7 raid that Iraq,
obviously seeking revenge, had begun moving some of its Soviet-supplied Scud missiles closer to the Iraq-
Jordan border. If
the Scuds were to be moved farther west into Jordan, Dimona
would be in range of a retaliatory strike by the Iraqis. Unlike
the reactor at Osirak, which had not yet begun full-scale operation,
Dimona had operated around the clock for eight months a
year to produce and reprocess weapons-grade plutonium for
nuclear weapons. An Iraqi strike could scatter deadly radioactive
contamination for dozens of miles.

Well before the bombing at Osirak, however, Israeli officials
had ordered the dome-shaped reactor and underground
reprocessing plant at Dimona to cease all operations; both were
kept out of service through the end of the year. The Israeli Air
Force was also instructed to keep intelligence aircraft in the sky
on a twenty-four-hour alert. There is no evidence that Washington
saw or understood any of the Israeli defensive actions.
A few British intelligence officials immediately suspected
that Israel had used the high-resolution KH-11 photography to
target Osirak, and they complained to their American counterparts
about it. In essence, one involved American recalled, they
were saying, "We told you so." The brilliant reputation of the
KH-11 system was reinforced, ironically, by Israel's successful
raid: high-resolution satellite photographs of the destroyed research
reactor were on the desks of Washington decision-makers
within a few hours of the mission.

The British were right, as a subsequent highly secret investigation
showed: Israel had gotten much valuable intelligence
from the KH-11. There was evidence that William J. Casey,
Ronald Reagan's director of central intelligence, had inadvertently
played a key role.

Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the imagery-sharing
program from the moment he took office, and early in his tenure
he ordered that the Israeli liaison officers be provided with
a private office near CIA headquarters. The goal, apparently,
was to give the Israelis direct access to the American intelligence officers who processed the KH-11 imagery to make sure
that all essential intelligence was turned over. Only Israelis, so
the reasoning went, would know what was important to Israel.
"Casey was prepared to show them a little thigh," one high-ranking
American official explained. "But he didn't roll over
and play dead for the Israelis."

The CIA director, suddenly confronted after Osirak with serious
questions about Israel's abuse of the KH-11 intelligence- sharing
agreement, authorized a small, ad hoc committee of
experts to review the matter. [8] The group was ordered to operate
with the heightened security that always surrounded Israeli
intelligence issues.

What the review group found was stunning.

In little more than two years, the Israelis had expanded what
had been a limited agreement to the point where they were
able to extract virtually any photograph they wished from the
system. Most surprisingly, the Israelis had requested and received
extensive KH-11 coverage of western Russia, including
Moscow. "The Israelis did everything except task [target] the
bird," one disturbed military man acknowledges. There was
anger at the senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency
and Defense Intelligence Agency for what some officials considered
their "very lax" management of the liaison agreement:
"We set up the system and we didn't bother to monitor what
they [the Israelis] were doing," the military man said. [9] William
B. Bader, who was serving in 1979 as assistant deputy under secretary of defense for policy, recalled his frustration at
knowing that the Israelis were "edging deeper into the overhead"
and not knowing how to stop it. "You didn't know
where to complain," Bader said. "We knew that these guys [the
Israelis] had access that went around the colonels and the deputy
assistant secretaries." If a complaint got to the wrong office,
he explained, "you might get your head handed back to you."

A former high-ranking NSA official recalled his anger upon
subsequently learning early in the Reagan administration that
Israeli military officers were permitted to attend Pentagon
meetings at which future missions and orbital flight paths for
the KH-11 were discussed. "People who knew about it wanted
to puke," the former official said. "With the care this [the KH-11]
got everywhere else, this blew our minds." However, another
senior American intelligence officer, agreeing that "a lot
of guys were shocked and dismayed," explained that he was
less troubled by the Israeli encroachment: "It was in our national interest to make sure in 1981 that the Israelis were going
to survive." This officer depicted the direct access provided to
Israel as "a compromise. Israel wanted to make sure that nothing
important was passed by. It needed to make sure it got all it
needed." The Israeli officer assigned to the Pentagon, the intelligence
officer said, was only relaying Israel's intelligence needs
to the men in charge of the KH-11 program. The Israeli, in
return, was allowed to "stand by" as the KH-11 funneled its
real-time imagery back to Washington.

A State Department official who was involved said he and
Secretary Haig viewed the arguments about Israeli access as
"an intelligence community theological debate. Why have a
fight? Give them the pictures. It's a confidence builder." It was
a zero-sum issue for the Israelis, this official added: if the Reagan
administration refused them access to the KH-11, they would
turn to Congress "and get the money [inserted into the foreign
aid budget] for a satellite, launching pad, and downlink."

To Richard Allen as well, Israel's manipulation of the
KH-11 agreement was no big deal: "I figured they had friends"
in the Pentagon who informally had provided the expanded
access.

It was finally agreed in the White House after the ad hoc
review that the photographs could continue to flow to Israel,
but with the initial 1979 restrictions emphatically back in force.
"We were going to narrow the aperture," Allen said; Israel
would no longer be permitted to get KH-11 imagery of the
Soviet Union or any other country outside the hundred-mile
limit. Allen personally relayed that message in the fall of 1981 to
Ariel Sharon, the controversial and hard-line Israeli general
and war hero who had been named defense minister in August
by the newly reelected Begin government.

Begin and Sharon were in Washington in September to
lobby the White House in support of a far-reaching Israeli plan
for a U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation against a shared enemy:
the Soviet Union. An Israeli memorandum for Washington argued
that the two nations needed to cooperate "against the
threat to peace and security of the region caused by the Soviet
Union or Soviet-controlled forces from outside the region introduced
into the region." To meet that need, the Israelis
sought Reagan's approval for the pre-positioning of American
military forces, joint use of airfields, joint planning for military
and political contingencies in the Middle East and Persian
Gulf, and the U.S. financing of a receiving station, or downlink,
for the KH-11 satellite imagery, to be located in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli proposals were understandably viewed as excessive
and were much watered down during negotiations over
the next few months, to Sharon's dismay. Sharon pushed especially
hard on the downlink issue, also insisting that the receiving
station be "dedicated"-meaning that the encoded signals
to and from the satellite to the downlink could be read only by
Israel. The United States thus would be in the untenable position
of not being able to know what intelligence the Israelis
were obtaining from its own satellite system.

It was a preposterous suggestion, and Allen privately told
Sharon so. "It was rough," Allen recalled. "He started bitching
about American aid being Band-Aids and mustard plaster. He
kept on saying, 'You want to give us Band-Aids. If that's what
you mean by strategic alliance, we're not interested.'" Allen, a
strong supporter of Israel, said he wasn't intimidated: "I saw
Sharon as a big tough swashbuckler who did a lot of bellowing."

***

The bombing at Osirak led to no significant changes in the
U.S.-Israeli relationship, nor were any serious questions raised
about Israel's need for so many KH-11 photographs from so
many places-a need that risked a breach in Israel's relations
with the United States. Despite the brief flap over Israeli access,
there were no lessons learned and KH-11 photographs
continued to flow to Israel. Some far-reaching changes were
triggered, however, for Israel.

The French, who had also been the chief suppliers of nuclear
materials and expertise to Iraq in return for oil, were embarrassed
as well as outraged by the Israeli attack. There were a
few officials in Paris who sought revenge by breaking long-held
vows of silence, and they began to tell about an earlier French
nuclear relationship in the Middle East: as secret partners in
the making of the Israeli bomb.

Ariel Sharon concluded after the cabinet room meeting that
the United States was not a reliable strategic ally. Returned to
a clandestine Israeli intelligence agency controlled by his defense
ministry, whose operations at the time were not fully
understood by Washington, and stood by as it intercepted intelligence
on the Middle East and Soviet Union from the most
sensitive agencies in America-the kind of intelligence that
Israel had been told it would no longer be able to get. An
American Jew working in the U.S. intelligence community had
volunteered his services to the agency several years earlier; he
would soon be put to work spying on his country for Israel.

***

It's almost certain that no one in Ronald Reagan's White
House
considered Sharon's request for a KH-11 downlink in Tel Aviv
in terms of Israel's nuclear ambitions. Similarly, the ad hoc
review group that William Casey had set up after Osirak to
monitor compliance with the 1979 intelligence-sharing agreement
blithely accepted Israel's explanation for its violation of
the rules: it had obtained the off-limits KH-11 imagery of the
Soviet Union solely to monitor the ongoing supply links between
Russia and its allies in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, there were not many, even in the American intelligence
community, who understood in 1981 why Israel had collected
satellite imagery of the Soviet Union and why Sharon
was so insistent on continued access to that intelligence: Israel
was itself a nuclear power that was targeting the Soviet Union
with its warheads and missiles.

_______________

Notes:

1. The KH-11 was at the time known to be the most significant advance in
outerspace
reconnaissance. The key element of the sixty-four-foot-Iong satellite
was a downward-
looking mirror in front of the camera that rotated from side to side,
like a periscope,
enabling the satellite to track a single location as it moved across the
atmosphere.
The result was a stereoscopic image of unusually high quality that could
be even
further enhanced by computer.

2. In August 1977, for example, the CIA produced a sixty-page study for
the President,
entitled "Iran in the 19805," that was predicated on the assumption that
the shah
would "be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s."
Five months later,
Carter, to his everlasting embarrassment, publicly toasted Iran at a
1977 New Year's
Eve state dinner in Tehran as "an island of stability in a turbulent
corner of the
world."

3. The British were denied full access, American officials explained, in
part because
of concern about what turned out to be a major leak inside the British
communications
intelligence establishment, known as GCHQ (for Government Communications
Headquarters).
American intelligence officials had learned by the end of the Carter
administration
that the -existence and capability of the KH-11 system were known to the
Soviets, and there were suspicions that someone in a senior position in
British intelligence was funneling vast amounts of technical information to Moscow. In
the fall of
1982. a former high-level GCHQ employee named Geoffrey A. Prime, of
Cheltenham,
was arrested on sex charges, and he subsequently confessed to spying for
the Soviets.
Prime, who was sentenced to a thirty-five-year jail term, was said by
British authorities
to have had access to "matters of the utmost secrecy." There were
British newspaper
reports that senior British officials had known of Prime's betrayal for
two years before
the arrest but had not told their American counterparts. The incident
led to inevitable
tension between the intelligence services of the two allies. "We were
holding back the
Brits for a definite reason," one American said. "We knew they had a
real problem
there and we were very, very sensitive about what we gave them." The
stern American
position was more than a little offset by the fact that a junior CIA
clerk named William
T. Kampiles had been sentenced to forty years in jail in 1978 after his
conviction for the
sale of a top--secret KH-11 technical manual to the Soviets. Kampiles
received $3,000 for
the manual, which included no KH-11 photographs-and thus presumably did
not
reveal just how good the satellite's optics could be. The trial of
Kampiles raised a
number of embarrassing questions about security at CIA headquarters,
where
Kampiles worked; at least sixteen other KH-11 technical manuals were
missing, and
there was testimony to the effect that Kampiles-and others, if they
wished- ere able
to leave the premises without any security check.

4. Moments later, Allen added, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,
who had
competed from inauguration day with all senior officials for influence
in the administration,
telephoned and excitedly demanded to know where the then-airborne President was: "Dick, I've got to talk to him right away." Allen asked why.
"I've just got to
talk to him." "Is it about the reactor?" Haig said yes. Allen said he
was too late: he had
just briefed Reagan. "What?" exclaimed Haig. "How did you find out?"
Allen laughed
at the recollection and added that Haig wouldn't know it, but he had
wasted his time in
rushing to tell Reagan: "The fact is you couldn't score brownie points
that way. Ronald
Reagan never remembered who told him first."

5. That issue also was hotly debated inside the American intelligence
community,
whose experts on nonproliferation did not have "complete information"-as
one involved
official put it-about Iraq's capabilities. After the Israeli strike, the
American
experts
concluded that Israel had bombed only one of two major targets at the
site; it
had destroyed the reactor as planned but left the nearby reprocessing
plant untouched.
It was in the reprocessing facility that plutonium could be chemically
recovered from
spent reactor fuel rods.

6. Many in the Israeli military also were glad to see Iraq sink hundreds
of millions of
dollars into the reactor rather than purchasing more tanks, planes, and
other conventional
arms.

7. Some American intelligence analysts instantly understood that Begin
had made a
mistake, but their reports were highly classified and never reached the
public.

8. Casey had made his first secret trip to Israel as CIA director a few
months earlier
and, according to Israelis, put in motion an ambitious list of joint
intelligence opera
tions aimed at rolling back Communism-actions, Casey believed, that had
all but
ceased during the Caner years. These included renewed espionage
activities inside the
Soviet Union, aid for the anti-Communist Solidarity movement in Poland,
and economic
and military support-in violation of a congressional ban-for Jonas Savimbi's
UNITA resistance movement in Angola. Casey also insisted upon and
apparently received
Israeli promises of support for what emerged in the early 1980s as one
of his
near-obsessions-covert aid to the anti-Communist Renamo insurgency in
Mozambique.
(A 1988 State Department study placed the number of civilians murdered
by
Renamo at more than 100,000, with an estimated one million Mozambicans
forced into
refugee status.) Despite the successful visit, Casey was embarrassed and
rankled by the
fact that his newfound colleagues in Israel had not seen fit to inform
him in advance of
the planned attack on Osirak. His CIA thus had failed to anticipate the
first serious
foreign policy crisis in the Reagan administration.

9. Adding to the dismay, surely, was the fact that President Carter, as
a security
measure, had, shortly after taking office, ordered a freeze on the
number of codework
clearances in the government. The freeze led to enormous complications
throughout
the intelligence world, because many analysts were not permitted access
to the information-such as that collected by the KH-11-they needed to do their job.

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